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and too much spam. 'Traditional' marketing techniques don't work.

Your best bet is to treat your ad like a directory listing. Because you're a small business targeting a specific area you should always mention your location in the ad. It's something that immediately separates it from the crowd; It gives viewers something they can relate to and on the world's very wide web, something local stands out.

Then you need to tell the reader what you do and why you do it better than anyone else; and you need to do it in a sentence. Make the sentence simple and avoid unnecessary words, especially adjectives. Your best bet is to use active verbs which describe the product or service being used by the customer. You don't need to include your business name.

That's what will get a click.

But it doesn't end there. Getting the internet user onto your website was just the first step (don't worry if you don't have a site yet, Google will help you make one). If your ad links to a boring internet site, then the reader isn't going to stay. Click some of the ads on this page, where do you end up? Does the site bore or excite you? Net users have very short attention spans, so you need to take them to an interesting, simple and well designed page.

But that's for another article to explain. This one in-fact: www.helium.com/tm/866602/inter net-creating-website-small

Goog le AdWords is popular with all advertisers, big business and small business; but it gives small business a real edge. Take advantage of location based web ads and pay per click. Cost isn't an issue because it's easy to set a maximum ad spend and Google doesn't set a minimum.

Good luck and happy advertising!

Learn more about this author, Ben Winsor.
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